Emile Zola - "La Conquete De Plassans"

Richard F. Burton - "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6"

Everett McNeil - "The Cave of Gold"

Samuel Wilberforce - "The Rocky Island"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Coast of Chance

E >> Esther Chamberlain >> The Coast of Chance




Some dim perception of this touched Flora as the houses, gliding past,
grew older, grayer, with steeper gardens, narrower streets, here and
there even trees, lone, sentinel, at the edge of cobbled gutters. From
the crest of the last hill they had looked a mile down the long gray
throat of the street to where the ferry building lay stretched out with
its one tall tower pricked up among the masts of shipping. Half-way
between their momentary perch and the ferry slips the street suddenly
thickened, darkened, swarmed, flying a yellow pennon high above
blackened roofs. And now, as they slipped down the long decline into
the foreign quarter the pungent oriental breath of Chinatown was blown
up to them. She breathed it in readily. It was pleasant because it was
strange, outlandish, suggesting a wide web of life beyond her own
knowledge. She wondered what Harry was thinking of it, as he sat with
his passive profile turned from her to the heathen street ahead. She
guessed, by the curl of his nostril, that it was only present to him as
an unpleasant odor to be got through as quickly as possible; but she was
wrong. He had another thought. This time, oddly enough, a thought for
her.

He gave it to her presently, abrupt, matter-of-fact, material. "That
Chinese goldsmith down there has good stuff now and then. How'd you like
to look in there before we go on to what-you-call-'em's,--the regular
place?"

"You mean for a ring?" She was doubtful only of his being in earnest.

"You have so many of the Shrove kind," he explained. "I thought you
might like it, Flora; you're so romantic!" he laughed.

"Like it!" she cried, too touched at his thought for her to resent the
imputation. "I should love it! But I didn't know they had such things."

"Now and then--though it is a rare chance."

"But that will be just the fun of it," she hastened, half afraid lest
Harry should change his mind, "to see if we can possibly find one that
will be different from all these others."

She kept this little feeling of exploration close about her, as they
left the car, a block above the green trees of the plaza, and entered
one of the narrow streets that was not even a cross-street, but an
alley, running to a bag's end, with balconies, green railings and
narcissi taking the sun.

A slant-eyed baby in a mauve blouse stared after them; and a white face
so poisoned in its badness that it gave Flora a start, peered at them
from across the street. It made her shrink a little behind Harry's broad
shoulder and take hold of his arm. The mere touch of that arm was
security. His big presence, moving agilely beside her, seemed to fill
the street with its strength, as if, by merely flinging out his arms,
Samson-like, he could burst the dark walls asunder.

In the middle of the block, sunk a little back from the fronts of the
others, the goldsmith's shop showed a single, filmed window; and the
pale glow through it proclaimed that the worker in metals preferred
another light to the sun's. The threshold was worn to a hollow that
surprised the foot; and the interior into which it led them gloomed so
suddenly around them after the broad sunlight, that it was a moment
before they made out the little man behind the counter, sitting hunched
up on a high stool.

"Hullo, Joe," said Harry, in the same voice that hailed his friends on
the street-corners; but the goldsmith only nodded like a nodding
mandarin, as if, without looking up, he took them in and sensed their
errand. He wore a round, blue Chinese cap drawn over his crown; a pair
of strange goggles like a mask over his eyes, and his little body seemed
to poise as lightly on his high stool as a wisp, as if there were no
more flesh in it than in his long, dry fingers that so marvelously
manipulated the metal. Save for that glitter of gold on his glass plate,
and the grin of a lighted brazier, all was dark, discolored and
cluttered.

And the way Harry bloomed upon this background of dubious antiquity! He
leaned on the little counter, which creaked under his weight, in his
big, fresh coat, with his clear, fresh face bent above the shallow tray
of trinkets--doubtful jades, dim-eyed rings, dull clasps and coins--his
large, fastidious finger poked among. He was the one vital thing in the
shop.

Over everything else was spread a dimness of age like dust. It enveloped
the little man behind the counter, not with the frailness that belongs
to human age, but with that weathered, polished hardness which time
brings to antiques of wood and metal. Indeed, he appeared so like a
carved idol in a curio shop that Flora was a little startled to find
that he was looking at her. Chinamen had always seemed to her blank
automatons; but this one looked keenly, pointedly, as if he personally
took note. She told herself whimsically that perhaps it was his
extraordinary glasses that gave point to that expression; and presently
when he took them off she was surprised to see it seemed verily true.
His little physiognomy had no more expression than a withered nut. But
there was something about it more disturbing than its vanishing
intelligence, something unexpected, and out of harmony with the rest of
him, yet so illusive that, flit over him as her eye would, she failed to
find it.

"Harry," she murmured to Cressy, who was still stirring the contents of
the box with a disdainful forefinger, "this little man gives me the
shivers."

"Old Joe?" Harry smiled indulgently. "He's a queer customer. Been quite
a figurehead in Chinatown for twenty years. Say, Joe, heap bad!" and
with the back of his hand he flicked the tray away from him.

The little man undoubled his knees and descended the stool. He stood
breast-high behind the counter. He dropped a lack-luster eye to the box.
"Velly nice," he murmured with vague, falling inflection.

"Oh, rotten!" Harry laughed at him.

"You no like?"

"No. No like. You got something else--something nice?"

"No." It was like a door closed in the face of their hope--that falling
inflection, that blank of vacuity that settled over his face, and his
whole drooping figure. He seemed to be only mutely awaiting their
immediate departure to climb back again on his high stool. But Harry
still leaned on the counter and grinned ingratiatingly. "Oh, Joe, you
good flen'. You got something pretty--maybe?"

The curtain of vacuity parted just a crack--let through a gleam of
intense intelligence. "Maybe." The goldsmith chuckled deeply, as if
Harry had unwittingly perpetrated some joke--some particularly clever
conjurer's trick. He sidled out behind the counter, past the grinning
brazier, and shuffled into the back of the shop where he opened a door.

Flora had expected a cupboard, but the vista it gave upon was a long,
black, incredibly narrow passage, that stretched away into gloom with
all the suggestion of distance of a road going over a horizon. Down this
the goldsmith went, with his straw slippers clapping on his heels, until
his small figure merged in the gloom and presently disappeared
altogether, and only the faint flipper-flap of his slippers came back
growing more and more distant to them, and finally dying into silence.
In the stillness that followed while they waited they could hear each
other breathe. The little shop with the water-stained walls and the
ancient odor--ancient as the empire of China--inclosed them like a spell
cast around them by a vanishing enchanter to hold them there mute until
his returning. They did not look at each other, but rather at the
glowing brazier, at the gold on the glass plates, at the forms of people
passing in the street, moving palely across the dim window pane, as
distant to Flora's eye as though they moved in another world. Then came
the flipper-flap of the goldsmith's slippers returning. The sound
snapped their tension, and Harry laughed.

"Lord knows how far he went to get it!"

"Across the street?" Flora wondered.

"Or under it. And it won't be worth two bits when it gets here." He
peered at the little man coming toward them down the passage, flapping
and shuffling, and carrying, held before him in both hands, a square,
deep little box.

It was a worn, nondescript box that he set down before them, but the
jealous way he had carried it had suggested treasure, and Flora leaned
eagerly forward as he raised the cover, half expecting the blaze of a
jewel-case. She saw at first only dull shanks of metal tumbled one upon
the other. But, after a moment's peering, between them she caught gleams
of veritable light. Her fingers went in to retrieve a hoop of heavy
silver, in the midst of which was sunk a flawed topaz. She admired a
moment the play of light over the imperfection.

"But this isn't Chinese," she objected, turning her surprise on Harry.

"Lots of 'em aren't. These men glean everywhere. That's pretty." He held
up a little circle of discolored but lusterful pearls--let it fall
again, since it was worth only a glance. He leaned on the counter,
indifferent to urge where value seemed so slight. He seemed amused at
Flora's enthusiasm for clouded opals.

"They look well enough among this junk," he said, "but compare them with
your own rings and you'll see the difference."

She heard him dreamily. She was wishing, as she turned over the tumble
of damaged jewels, that things so pretty might have been perfect. To
find a perfect thing in this place would be too extraordinary to hope
for. Yet, taking up the next, and the next, she found herself wishing it
might be this one--this cracked intaglio. No? Then this blue one--say.
The setting spoke nothing for it. It was a plain, thin, round hoop of
palpable brass, and the battered thing seemed almost too feeble to hold
the solitary stone. But the stone! She looked it full in the eye, the
big, blazing, blue eye of it. What was the matter with this one? A flaw?
She held it to the light.

She felt Harry move behind her. She knew he couldn't but be looking at
it. For how, by all that was marvelous, had she for a moment doubted it?
Down to its very heart, which was near to black, it was clear fire, and
outward toward the facets struck flaming hyacinth hues with zigzag white
cross-lights that dazzled and mesmerized. Just the look of it--the
marvelous deep well of its light--declared its truth.

"Harry," she breathed, without taking her gaze from the thing in her
hand, "do look at this!"

She felt him lean closer. Then with an abrupt "Let's see it," he took it
from her--held it to the light, laid it on his palm, looking sharply
across the counter at the shopkeeper, then back at the ring with a long
scrutiny. His face, too, had a flush of excitement.

"Is it--good?" Flora faltered.

"A sapphire," he said, and taking her third finger by the tip, he slid
on the thin circle of metal.

She breathed high, looking down at the stone with eyes absorbed in the
blue fire. There was none of the cupidity of women for jewels in her
look. It was the intrinsic beauty of this drop of dark liquid light that
had captured her. It had mystery, and her imagination woke to it--the
wistful mystery of perfect beauty. And perfect beauty in such a place!
It was too beautiful. The feeling it brought her was too sharp for pure
pleasure. It was dimly like fear. Yet instinctively she shut her hand
about the ring. She murmured out her wonder.

"How in the world did such a thing come here?"

"Oh, not so strange," Harry answered. He leaned on his elbow upon the
counter, his head bent close to hers above the single, glittering point
that drew the four eyes to one focus. "Sailors now and then pick up a
thing of whose value they have no idea--get hard up, and pawn it--still
without any idea. These chaps"--and his bold hand indicated the
shopkeeper--"take in anything--that is, anything worth their while; and
wait, and wait, and wait until they see just the moment--and turn it to
account."

It might be because Harry's eyes were so taken with the jewel that his
tongue ran recklessly. He had spoken low, but Flora sent an anxious
glance to be sure the shopkeeper hadn't overheard. She had meant only to
glance, but she found herself staring into eyes that stared back from
the other side of the counter. That wide, unwinking scrutiny filled her
whole vision. For an instant she saw nothing but the dance of
scintillant pupils. Then, with a little gasp she clutched at her
companion's arm.

"Oh, Harry!"

His glance came quickly round to her. "Why, what's the matter?"

She murmured, "That Chinaman has blue eyes."

He looked at her with good-natured wonder.

"Why, Flora, haven't you blue on the brain? I believe he has, though,"
he added, as he peered across the counter at the shopkeeper, whose gaze
now fluttered under narrowed lids; "but why in the world should blue
eyes scare you?" His look returned indulgently to Flora's face.

She could not explain her reason of fear to him. She could not explain
it to herself more than that the eyes had seemed to know. What? She
could not tell; but they had had a deadly intelligence. She only
whispered back, "But he is awful!"

"Oh, I guess not," Harry grinned, and turned his back to the counter,
"only part white. Makes him a little sharper at a bargain."

But, in spite of his off-handedness, Flora saw he was alert, touched
with excitement. Once or twice he looked from the shopkeeper to the
sapphire.

"Do you like it, Flora?" he said. "Do you want it?" He spoke eagerly
against her reluctance.

"It is the most beautiful thing I ever saw, but--" She could not put it
to him why she shrank from it. That feeling which had touched her at the
first had a little expanded, the sense of the sapphire's sinister charm.
She faltered out as much as she could explain. "It's too much for me."

His shoulders shook with appreciation of this. "Oh, I guess not! If you
keep that up I shall be thinking you mean it is too much for me."

It hadn't been in the least what she meant, but now that he had
suggested it to her--"Well, I shouldn't like it to be," she blushed, but
she braved him.

The ring of his laughter filled the little, dark, old shop, and made the
proprietor blink.

"Oh, I guess not," he said again, and with that he seemed to make an end
of her hesitations. There was not another objection she could bring up.
She let him draw the ring off her hand with a mingled feeling of
reluctance and relief. She saw him turn briskly to the shopkeeper.

"Now, Joe, how much you want?" That much she heard as she turned away
with a fear lest it might, and a hope that it would be, too much for
him!

She lingered away to the door, through whose upper glazed half she saw
the street swarming and sunny, picked out with streamers of red and
squares of green. The murmur of traffic outside was faint to her ears.
The murmur of the two voices talking on inside the shop momently grew
fainter. She looked behind her and saw them now in the back of the shop,
close by the grinning brazier.

The light of it showed what would have been otherwise dark. It showed
her Harry, straddling, hands in pockets, hat thrust back, a silhouette
as hard as if cast in cold metal. The aspect of him, thus, was strange,
not quite unlike himself, but giving her the feeling that she had never
known how much Harry smoothed over.

Perhaps men were always like that with men. Still she looked away again
because she felt she had taken a liberty in catching him when he was
coming out so plain and coming out so positive to the shopkeeper, whom
he seemed really to be bullying. She felt that, considering the
sapphire, nothing that went on about it could be too extraordinary. And
yet the tone their voices were taking on made her nervous. Whatever they
were arguing about, she found it hard to go on standing thus with her
back to it, and for so long, while her expectancy tightened, and her
unreasonable idea that she did not want the ring, more and more took
hold of her. If he did not want to sell it, why not let it go--the
beautiful thing!

She thought she would call Harry, and suggest it--but no. She hesitated.
She would give them a chance to finish it themselves. She would count
ten pigtails past the window first. She watched the last far into the
distance, and still she was there, blowing hot and cold. She would call
to Harry--call out to him from where she stood, that she wouldn't have
the thing.

She turned, and there they were yet. They had not moved. The shadow of
the gesticulating little Chinaman danced like a bird on the wall, and
before him Harry glowed, immovable, but ruddy, as if the hard metal
whereof he was cast was slowly heating through. The thought came to her
then. Harry was iron! The hard shade of his profile on the wall, the
stiff movement of his lips, the forward thrust of his head on his
shoulders gave her another thought. Was Harry also brutal? The sight of
that brutality awake, feeding, as it were, on the fluttering little
figure before it, distressed her. How long were they going on putting an
edge to their argument? There was continually with her the fear that it
might sharpen into a quarrel; for now the goldsmith had ceased his
gesticulation and became suddenly immobile, and still Harry was
requiring of him the same thing. It was insisted upon, by all the lines
of his stiff braced figure, and she had a fluttered expectancy that if
the little man didn't do something quickly, now--now it would happen.

What she expected of Harry, a violent act or a quick relaxation of his
iron mood, she had not time to consider, for the shopkeeper had moved.
He was jerking his head, his thumb, and finally his arm in the direction
of the long, dim passage--such a pointed direction, such a singular
gesture, as to startle her with its incongruity. What had that to do
with the price of the ring? And if it had nothing to do with the price
of the ring, what had they been talking about? Her small scruple against
knowing what was going on behind her was forgotten. Indeed, now she was
oblivious of everything else. She was taking it in with all her eyes,
when Harry turned and looked at her. And, oddly enough, she thought he
looked as if he wondered how she came there. She saw him return to it
slowly. Then, in a flash, he met her brilliantly. He came toward her
out of the gloom, holding the ring before him, as if with the light of
that, and the flash of his smile, he was anxious immediately to cover
his deficit.

"I had the very devil of a time getting it," he said. "The little beggar
didn't want to let me have it." But there was a subsiding excitement in
his face, and a something in his manner, both triumphant and troubled,
which his explanation did not reasonably account for. Had Harry felt the
touch of the same strange influence that the little shop, and the
blue-eyed Chinaman, and the sapphire, had wrought around her? Or was it
something more salient, the same thing that had suggested itself to her
with the violent gesticulation of the shopkeeper at the passage--that
some question other than the mere transfer of the ring had come up
between them?

"Harry"--she hesitated--"are you quite sure it's all right?"

"All right?" The sudden edge in his voice made her look at him. "Why,
it's genuine, if that's what you mean."

It hadn't been, quite; but her meaning was too vague to put into
words--a mere sensation of uneasiness. She watched Harry turn the ring
over, as if he were reluctant to let it go out of his hands. And then,
looking at her, she thought his glance was a little uncertain. She
thought he hesitated, and when he finally slid the ring over her finger,
"I wouldn't wear it until it is reset," he said. "That setting isn't
gold. It's hardly decent."

"Yes," she assented; "Clara will laugh at us."

"She won't if we don't show it to her until it's fit to appear. In fact,
I would rather you wouldn't. As it is now, the thing doesn't represent
my gift to you."

She felt this was Harry's conventional streak asserting itself. But even
she had to admit that an engagement ring which was palpably not gold was
rather out of the way.

"You'd better keep it a day or two and look it over and make up your
mind how you want it set, and then we'll spring it on them," he
advised.

But now it was finally on her finger, she did not want to think it would
ever have to be taken off again. She drew her glove over it. The great
facets showed sharp angles under the thin kid. She wished the sapphire
were not quite so large, so difficult to reconcile with everything else.
Now that she had the perfect thing with her, clasping her so heavily
around the third finger, she was half afraid it was going to be too much
for her, after all.




VII

A SPELL IS CAST


It was hers! She did not believe it. It had been done too quickly. It
seemed to her she had hardly felt Harry slip it on her finger before
they had left the shop; that she had hardly shaken off the musty
inclosed atmosphere, before Harry had left her on the corner of
California and Powell Streets--left her alone with the ring! Still, she
didn't believe she had it, even while she looked at the large lump it
made under her glove. She kept feeling it with a cautious finger-tip.

A trio of girls she knew flocked off the California Street car and
surrounded her. They were going to the White House for bargains in shirt
waists. They wanted to carry her off in their company. They encompassed
her in a chatter of lace and lingerie. There were held up to her all
the interests of her every-day existence; but these seemed to have no
part in her real life. They had never appeared more remote and trivial.
She kept her conscious hand in the folds of her skirt. She would have
liked to strip off her glove and show them the ring. It would have
entertained them so much. To herself its entertainment was of the
Arabian Nights--the way of its finding, its beauty in the false setting,
the struggle over it in the shop--all were wine to her imagination. It
was a thing to conjure adventure; it was a talisman of romance.

She colored faintly as she mentally corrected herself. It was her
engagement ring, and as such she had never once thought of it. Strange,
when all the forms of her engagement had been so well observed; when
Harry himself represented that side of life to which she had tried to
form herself from as far back as the old days when her mother had made
fun of her fancies. It must be right, she thought, this life of
conventions and forms; and the queer way she saw things, something
wrong in her. But because she knew herself different, and because she
felt life without understanding it, she feared it. It was too big to
take hold of alone. And she was so alone; and Harry was so strong, so
matter-of-fact; alone like herself, yet adequate in the world she was
afraid of. She had accepted him as naturally, and yet as unreally, as
she took all that life, and to the moment she had never questioned the
wisdom or the happiness. She didn't question now. She only was shocked
that so large a fact in her life as her engagement could be completely
wiped out for the moment by a thing so trivial. It was not even the
ring. It was the feeling she had about the ring. Her imagination was
always running away with her, as it had the night at the club. And here
it was, still uncurbed, speeding her forward into fields of romance.

She went over whole dramas--imaginary histories of chance and
circumstance--woven about the ring, as she walked up and down the long,
windy hills, westward and homeward, the blue bay on the one hand beaten
green under the rising "trade," and the fog coming in before her. With
the experience of the morning, and the exercise and the lively air, her
spirits were riding high. From time to time she had the greatest longing
to peep again at the sapphire, but not until the house door had closed
after her did she dare draw off her glove and look. It was still
glorious. What a pity she must take it off! Yet that point Harry had
made about not showing it had been too sharp to be disregarded. But what
could she say, supposing Clara asked about the morning's expedition? At
this thought all her spring deserted her, and she went slowly up the
stair. Perhaps Clara had forgotten about it, and then it recurred
reassuringly to her mind how seldom Clara touched anywhere near the
subject of her engagement.

None the less, she went very softly down the hall, anxious lest Clara
might open her door and ask what she had brought home with her.

But even in the refuge of her own rooms the ring encircled Flora with
unease. The light of it on her finger made her restless. It wasn't that
she was apprehensive of it, but she could not forget it. She could hear
the maid Marrika moving about in the room beyond. She could hear the
rustle of clothes carried to and fro. She knew there were things to
dress for--a luncheon, and a bevy of teas--things which must be gone
through with, things which at other times she had found sufficiently
pleasurable. But now, try as she would to turn her mind to these, it
persistently wandered back to the jewel. All the fine, simple pleasure
of the morning was dazzled out by it. She slipped it off her finger on
to the dressing-table, and it lay among her laces like a purple prism,
cast by some unearthly sun in a magic glass. She had jewels, rubies
even--the most precious--but nothing that gave her this sense of
individual beauty, of beauty so keen as to be disturbing. She emptied
her jewel casket in a glittering heap around it. It shone out
unquenched. It had not been the dingy little shop, and the dingy little
street, and the odds and ends of jade and tarnished silver that had
made it of such a value. It seemed to her that any eye would fix it, any
hand pluck it out first from that shining heap before her.

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